Choosy FAQ, from Choosy Website, accessed November 2018. Young, “Choosy Secures $5.4 Million Seed Round.” Women’s Wear Daily, May 15, 2018,, accessed November 2018. Will Choosy buck the trend and skip brick-and-mortar, or can they create a retail concept that allows them to maintain their just-in-time, consumer-driven product development process? What could a retail concept like this look like? Many direct-to-consumer digital-only players have since built retail footprints (e.g., Warby Parker), which leads me to believe consumers have an enduring desire to experience brands in-person before purchase. Looking ahead, I am curious about Choosy’s customer experience (i.e., the trade-off between digital-only and brick-and-mortar). It becomes even more challenging if you do not invest in building a culture that prioritizes technology, data and analytics from the start.
Choosy dress software#
From experience, a fashion/lifestyle start-up typically has more difficulty recruiting engineering/data talent than a traditional software start-up simply due to its industry.
Regardless of this business model decision, Choosy needs to invest in building a data- and product-focused culture to attract high-caliber technical talent. Choosy can instead focus on optimizing its vertically-integrated supply chain and building an online portal and digital product that is simple and easy to use.įigure 2. This model still allows Choosy to leverage its just-in-time production process but would decrease the burden on Choosy to decide which final set of products to make. Once a product hits a predetermined threshold set by Choosy, Choosy could help produce them. In this model, users can post styles they have seen, and other users can pre-order them. My recommendation would be to transition to a Two-Sided Platform model (e.g., Kickstarter), where users can directly interact with each other.
Choosy is still an Integrator Platform that sits between the “External Innovators” and the “Customers”, where Choosy still plays a role in picking what styles to make. There may, however, be an even greater opportunity in Choosy relinquishing even more control over product selection. The closer Choosy can come to an Unsupervised Learning Algorithm, the more sustainable their cost structure will become. In the near future, Choosy will invest in their machine learning capabilities to decrease their reliance on these Style Scouts, parse customer input data faster and release styles sooner. Once Choosy gets this data from consumers, it applies its machine learning algorithm and its team of Style Scouts to curate the final collection. Instead of relying on in-house designers to create a product line like Zara does, Choosy curates a product line directly based on what their customers chose, reducing the need to predict which styles customers want to buy. However, where Choosy’s true magic happens is around Critical Task #1, where they put the power of product selection in the hands of their users. In Critical Task #2, Choosy applied just-in-time production process to Zara’s vertically-integrated supply chain, reducing the amount of guesswork they have to do in forecasting customer demand. However, Zara still has to guess which high-fashion styles consumers want and then guess how many they plan to buy, leaving room for waste.Ĭhoosy not only takes Zara’s model a step further in multiple ways, but it also recognizes that Critical Task #2 is highly dependent on Critical Task #1. As a result, Zara remained in closer touch with fast-changing consumer trends and it has since benefited from “more frequent shopper visits to stores, fewer sales on markdowns and faster cash conversion cycles” than its competitors with longer production lead times. The fast-fashion retailer, Zara, tried to fix this problem by building a vertically-integrated supply chain, which allowed it to copy and deliver styles directly from the runways to its stores in a matter of weeks. The fashion giant H&M was reportedly sitting on $4.3BN of unsold inventory in March 2018. Unsold inventory results in higher discounts, squeezed margins, inventory holding/disposal costs, and higher COGS.
Choosy dress series#
Pathways to Just Digital Future Watch this tech inequality series featuring scholars, practitioners, & activistsĬritical Task #1: Predict which styles consumers want to buyĬritical Task #2: Predict how many they want to buyįailure to deliver on these Critical Tasks results in unsold inventory, which has become a burden to retailers.
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